(fragment of a poem)
I’m speaking to make you silent
and to hear the silence that I’ve broken.
Or else how can I be convinced of its existence? The cast seal
of silence is broken easily by a single movement of lips.
“I saw their temples on the snow”—
Turning over the pages of the vast epistle
I’m repeating aloud the alien silence unsealed without curiosity.
“I’m speaking to believe it.
I’m speaking to believe it.”—
I’m saying twice without thinking
to believe it.—“On the snow
I saw their temples.
They stood in the equal squares like crimson bells
covered with the leaking lacquer or sealing wax,
not hollow but solid,
and their form could remind me of Cambodian constructions
if their form and content were not in fact an entity—
the crimson lacquer in and outside
or the sealing-wax, as was said earlier, the crimson sealing-wax.
They were bound by the chains perhaps of cast-iron,
I don’t know for sure,
but undoubtedly black and heavy.”
They?—About whom was this said? About temples or about Khmers
whose temples she’s seen?
“Though I didn’t step over the chains
I found myself in the middle of the square.”—
What does it mean? Perhaps she was hooked
by a gaff, up from the bottom of the silence,
and placed in the closed garden,
or she passed by the tongueless bells
as a trembling of fire passes, hot
and licking the leaks of the sealing-wax.
Translated by the author and edited by Ashraf Noor